
Class 



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Book_^ 3 
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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



aatoerjsttie C&ucational jttonograp^js 



EDITED BY HENRY SUZZALLO 

PROFESSOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 
TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



&?% 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 
IN EDUCATION 

BY 
JOHN DEWEY 

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 




HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

BOSTON, NEW YORK AND CHICAGO 

(Cue ftiucrj*i&c f&re&j Cambridge 



LBlofc5 

."B-5* 



COPYRIGHT, I913, BY JOHN DEWEY 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



The opening paragraphs of the following essay 
follow closely the author's monograph on In- 
terest as Related to Will in the First Year Book 
of the National Herbart Society. The author is 
indebted to the Society for permission to use this 
material. 



STht ftibersfoe JJress 

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



rf /r. 



CONTENTS 



Editor's Introduction 

I. Unified versus Divided Activity . . 
II. Interest as Direct and Indirect . . 

III. Effort, Thinking, and Motivation. . 

IV. Types of Educative Interest .... 
V. The Place of Interest in the Theory 

of Education 



v 

i 
16 
46 
65 

90 



Outline 97 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

It is a pleasant privilege to present the following 
monograph to the profession and the public, for 
there is no discussion which is more fundamental 
to the interpretation and reform of current teach- 
ing than this statement of the functions of inter- 
est and effort in education. Its active acceptance 
by ^teachers would bring about a complete trans- 
formation of classroom methods. Its appreciation 
by the patrons of the schools would greatly 
modify current criticism of the various programs 
of educational reform. The worth of this pre- 
sentation is well summarized in the statement 
that, if teachers and parents could know inti- 
mately only one treatise on educational proce- 
dure, it is greatly to be doubted that any other 
could be found which would, within small com- 
pass, so effectively direct them to the points of 
view, the attitudes of mind, and the methods of 
work which are essential to good teaching. 
By good teaching we here mean that provision 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

of school experience wherein the child is whole- 
heartedly active in acquiring the ideas and skill 
needed to deal with the problems of his expand- 
ing life. That our present instruction falls far 
short of this standard must be obvious to all who 
are not blinded by their professional adherence 
to narrow scholastic measures of efficiency, or 
by their loyal appreciation of the great contribu- 
tions already made by schools in spite of their de- 
fects. Somehow our teaching has not attracted 
children to the school and its work. Too many 
children leave school as soon as the law allows. 
Too many pupils, still within the compulsory 
attendance age, are retarded one, two, or more 
grades. Too many of the able and willing of mind 
are only half-engrossed with their school tasks. 
And of, those who emerge from the schools, duly 
certified, too many are skillful merely in an outer 
show of information and manners which gives 
no surety that the major part of their inner im- 
pulses are capable of rational and easy self-direc- 
tion. For a long time we have tolerated these 
conditions in the belief that economic pressure 
drives the poor out of school, and that the stu- 
vi 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

pidity or perversity of children accounts for their 
retardation and their half-heartedness. But re- 
cent investigations have made us skeptical of 
these easy defenses. The pressure of poverty 
does not seem to be so great an influence on the 
elimination of pupils as that attitude of child 
and parent which doubts the worth of further 
schooling. And we find that many children, 
whom we have considered backward or perverse, 
are merely bored by the unappealing tasks and 
formalities of school life. The major difficulty 
with our schools is that they have not adequately 
enlisted the interests and energies of children in 
school work. Good teaching, the teaching of the 
future, will make school life vital to youth. In so 
doing it will not lose sight of the demands and 
needs of an adult society; it will serve them 
better in that it will have a fuller cooperation 
of the children. 

A single illustration will suffice to show how 
completely we may fall short of realizing public 
purposes in education if we fail to center our at- 
tention on the fundamental function and nature 
of the learning process. 



vn 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

At the present hour we are very deeply con- 
cerned with the universal education of youth. 
To this end we have established a compulsory 
school attendance age, forbidden child labor, and 
provided administrative machinery for executing 
these legal guarantees of the rights of children. 
Yet, a guarantee of school attendance will never 
of itself fulfill the purposes of state education. 
The parent and the attendance officer, reinforced 
by the police power of the state, can guarantee 
only one thing, — the physical presence of the 
child at school. It is left to the teacher to insure 
his mental attendance by a sound appeal to his 
active interests. A child's character, knowledge, 
and skill are not reconstructed by sitting in a 
room where events happen. Events must happen 
to hint, in a way to bring a full and interested 
response. It is altogether possible for the child 
to be present physically, yet absent mentally. 
He may be indifferent to school life, or his mind 
may be focused on something remote from the 
classroom. In either case he is not attending; 
he does not react to what occurs. The teacher 
has not created an experience for him ; she has 
viii 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

not changed the child at all. Yet society has 
guaranteed him freedom from industrial exploita- 
tion and provided a school system for one pur- 
pose, — that he should be changed from an im- 
mature child with meager knowledge and power 
into a responsible citizen competent to deal force- 
fully with the intricacies of modern life. 

Our whole policy of compulsory education rises 
or falls with our ability to make school life an 
interesting and absorbing experience to the child. 
In one sense there is no such thing as compul- 
sory education. We can have compulsory phy- 
sical attendance at school ; but education comes 
only through willing attention to and participa- 
tion in school activities. It follows that the 
teacher must select these activities with refer- 
ence to the child's interests, powers, and capaci- 
ties. In no other way can she guarantee that the 
child will be present. The evil of the elimination 
of pupils cannot be solved simply by raising the 
compulsory school age ; or that of retardation by 
promoting a given percentage of pupils regard- 
less of standards of grading; or that of half- 
hearted work by increasing the emphasis upon 
ix 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

authority, uniformity, coercion, drill, and ex- 
amination. The final solution is to be found in a 
better quality of teaching, one which will absorb 
children because it gives purpose and spirit to 
learning. 



INTEREST AND EFFORT IN 
EDUCATION 

I 

UNIFIED VERSUS DIVIDED ACTIVITY 

In the educational lawsuit of interest versus effort, 
let us consider the respective briefs of plaintiff and 
defendant. In behalf of interest it is claimed that 
it is the sole guarantee of attention ; if we can 
secure interest in a given set of facts or ideas, we 
may be perfectly sure that the pupil will direct 
his energies toward mastering them ; if we can 
secure interest in a certain moral train or line 
of conduct, we are equally safe in assuming 
that the child's activities are responding in that 
direction ; if we have not secured interest, we 
have no safeguard as to what will be done in any 
given case. As a matter of fact, the doctrine of 
discipline has not succeeded. It is absurd to sup- 
pose that a child gets more intellectual or men- 
tal discipline when he goes at a matter unwill- 
i 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

ingly than when he goes at it out of the fullness 
of his heart. The theory of effort simply says 
that unwilling attention (doing something dis- 
agreeable because it is disagreeable) should take 
precedence over spontaneous attention. 

Practically the appeal to sheer effort amounts 
to nothing. When a child feels that his work is 
a task, it is only under compulsion that he gives 
himself to it. At every let-up of external pressure 
his attention, released from constraint, flies to 
what interests him. The child brought up on 
the basis of "effort" acquires marvelous skill 
in appearing to be occupied with an uninterest- 
ing subject, while the real heart of his ener- 
gies is otherwise engaged. Indeed, the theory 
contradicts itself. It is psychologically impos- 
sible to call forth any activity without some in- 
terest. The theory of effort simply substitutes 
one interest for another. It substitutes the im- 
pure interest of fear of the teacher or hope of 
future reward for pure interest in the material 
presented. The type of character induced is that 
illustrated by Emerson at the beginning of his 
essay on Compensation, where he holds up the 

2 



UNIFIED VERSUS DIVIDED ACTIVITY 

current doctrine of compensation as implying 
that, if you only sacrifice yourself enough now, 
you will be permitted to indulge yourself a great 
deal more in the future ; or, if you are only good 
now (goodness consisting in attention to what is 
uninteresting) you will have, at some future time, 
a great many more pleasing interests — that is, 
may then be bad. 

While the theory of effort is always holding 
up to us a strong, vigorous character as the out- 
come of its method of education, practically we 
do not get such a character. We get either the 
narrow, bigoted man who is obstinate and irre- 
sponsible save in the line of his own preconceived 
aims and beliefs ; or else a character dull, mechani- 
cal, unalert, because the vital juice of spontane- 
ous interest has been squeezed out. 

We may now hear the defendant's case. Life, 
says the other theory, is full of things not inter- 
esting that have to be faced. Demands are con- 
tinually made, situations have to be dealt with, 
which present no features of interest. Unless 
one has had previous training in devoting him- 
self to uninteresting work, unless habits have 
3 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

been formed of attending to matters simply be- 
cause they must be attended to irrespective of 
the personal satisfaction they afford, character 
will break down or avoid the issue when con- 
fronted with the serious matters of life. Life is 
not a merely pleasant affair, or a continual satis- 
faction of personal interests. There must be such 
continual exercise of effort in the performance of 
tasks as to form the habit of dealing with the 
real labors of life. Anything else eats out the 
fiber of character and leaves a wishy-washy, 
colorless being ; a state of moral dependence, 
with continual demand for amusement and dis- 
traction. 

Apart from the question of the future, con- 
tinually to appeal even in childhood days to the 
principle of interest is eternally to excite, that 
is, distract the child. Continuity of activity is 
destroyed. Everything is made play, amusement. 
This means over-stimulation ; it means dissipa- 
tion of energy. Will is never called into action. 
The reliance is upon external attractions and 
amusements. Everything is sugar-coated for the 
child, and he soon learns to turn from everything 
4 



UNIFIED VERSUS DIVIDED ACTIVITY 

that is not artificially surrounded with diverting 
circumstances. The spoiled child who does only 
what he likes is an inevitable outcome. 

The theory is intellectually as well as morally 
harmful. Attention is never directed to the es- 
sential and important facts, but simply to the 
attractive wrappings with which the facts are 
surrounded. If a fact is repulsive or uninterest- 
ing, it has to be faced in its own naked character 
sooner or later. Putting a fringe of fictitious in- 
terest around it does not bring the child any 
nearer to it than he was at the outset. The fact 
that two and two make four is a naked fact which 
has to be mastered in and of itself. The child 
gets no greater hold upon the fact by having at- 
tached to it amusing stories of birds or dande- 
lions than if the simple naked fact were presented 
to him. It is self-deception to suppose that the 
child is being interested in the numerical rela- 
tion. His attention is going out to and taking in 
only the amusing images associated with this re- 
lation. The theory thus defeats its own end. It 
would be more straightforward to recognize at 
the outset that certain facts having little or no 
5 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

interest, must be learned and that the only way 
to deal with them is through effort, the power of 
putting forth activity independently of any ex- 
ternal inducement. In this way only is the disci- 
pline, the habit of responding to serious matters, 
formed which is necessary for the life that lies 
ahead of the child. 

I have attempted to set forth the respective 
claims of each side of the discussion. A little re- 
flection will convince us that the strong point in 
each argument lies not so much in what it says in 
its own behalf as in its attacks on the weak places 
of the opposite theory. Each theory is strong in 
its negations rather than in its position. It is 
not unusual, though somewhat surprising, that 
there is generally a common principle uncon- 
sciously assumed at the basis of two theories 
which to all outward appearances are the extreme 
opposites of each other. Such a common prin- 
ciple is found on the theories of effort and in- 
terest in the one-sided forms in which they have 
already been stated. 

The common assumption is that of the exter- 
nality of the object, idea, or end to be mastered 
6 



UNIFIED VERSUS DIVIDED ACTIVITY 

to the self. Because the object or end is assumed 
to be outside self it has to be made interest- 
ing ; to be surrounded with artificial stimuli and 
with fictitious inducements to attention. Or, be- 
cause the object lies outside the sphere of self, 
the sheer power of "will," the putting forth of 
effort without interest, has to be appealed to. 
The genuine principle of interest is the principle 
of the recognized identity of the fact to be learned 
or the action proposed with the growing self; that 
it lies in the direction of the agent's own growth, 
and is, therefore, imperiously demanded, if the 
agent is to be himself. Let this condition of iden- 
tification once be secured, and we have neither to 
appeal to sheer strength of will, nor to occupy 
ourselves with making things interesting. 

The theory of effort means a virtual division 
of attention and the corresponding disintegra- 
tion of character, intellectually and morally. The 
great fallacy of the so-called effort theory is that 
it identifies the exercise and training of mind 
with certain external activities and certain ex- 
ternal results. It is supposed that, because a child 
is occupied at some outward task and because 
7 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

he succeeds in exhibiting the required product, 
that he is really putting forth will, and that 
definite intellectual and moral habits are in pro- 
cess of formation. But, as a matter of fact, the 
exercise of will is not found in the external as- 
sumption of any posture ; the formation of moral 
habit cannot be identified with ability to show 
up results at the demand of another. The exer- 
cise of will is manifest in the direction of atten- 
tion, and depends upon the spirit, the motive, 
the disposition in which work is carried on. 

A child may externally be entirely occupied 
with mastering the multiplication table, and be 
able to reproduce that table when asked to do so 
by his teacher. The teacher may congratulate 
himself that the child has been exercising his 
will power so as to form right habits. Not so, 
unless right habit be identified with this ability 
to show certain results when required. The ques- 
tion of educative training has not been touched 
until we know what the child has been internally 
occupied with, what the predominating direction 
of his attention, his feelings, his disposition has 
been while he has been engaged upon this task. 
8 



I 



UNIFIED VERSUS DIVIDED ACTIVITY 

If the task appeals to him merely as a task, it 
is as certain psychologically, as is the law of 
action and reaction physically, that the child is 
simply engaged in acquiring the habit of divided 
attention ; that he is getting the ability to direct 
eye and ear, lips and mouth, to what is present 
before him so as to impress those things upon his 
memory, while at the same time he is setting his 
thoughts free to work upon matters of real in- 
terest to him. 

No account of the educative training actually 
secured is adequate unless it recognizes the di- 
vision of attention into which the child is being 
educated, and faces the question of what the 
worth of such a division may be. External me- 
chanical attention to a task as a task is inevitably 
accompanied by random mind-wandering along 
the lines of the pleasurable. 

The spontaneous power of the child, his de- /, 
mand for realization of his own impulses, cannot 
be suppressed. If the external conditions are 
such that the child cannot put his activity into 
the work to be done, he learns, in a most miracu- 
lous way, the exact amount of attention that has 
9 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

to be given to this external material to satisfy 
requirements of the teacher, while saving up t 
rest of his powers for following out lines of si 
gestion that appeal to him. I do not say tfc 
there is absolutely no moral training involved*' 
forming these habits of external attention, bt*J 
say that there is also a question of moral import 
as to the formation of habits of intellectual dissi- 
pation. 

While we are congratulating ourselves upon 
the well-disciplined habits which the pupil is ac- 
quiring (judged by his ability to reproduce a les- 
son when called upon) we forget to commiserate, 
ourselves because his deeper nature has securedJB 
no discipline at all, but has been left to follow 
its own caprices and the disordered suggestions of 
the moment. I do not see how anyone can deny 
that the training of habits of imagination and 
lines of emotional indulgence is at least equally 
important with the development of certain out- 
ward habits of action. For myself, when it comes* 
to the moral question, not merely to that of prac- 
tical convenience, I think it is infinitely more 
important. Nor do I see how anyone at all fam' 
10 



JFIED VERSUS DIVIDED ACTIVITY 

with the great mass of existing school work 
n deny that the greater part of the pupils are 
adually forming habits of divided attention. If 
e teacher is skillful and wide-awake, if she is 
iat is termed a good disciplinarian, the child 
.1 indeed learn to keep his senses intent in cer- 
tain ways, but he will also learn to direct his 
thoughts, which should be concentrated upon 
subject matter if the latter is to be significant, 
in quite other directions. It would not be wholly 
palatable if we had to face the actual condition 
of the majority of pupils that leave our schools. 
We should find this division of attention and the 
resulting disintegration so great that we might 
cease teaching in sheer disgust. None the less, 
it is well for us to recognize that this state of 
things exists, and that it is the inevitable out- 
come of those conditions which exact the simu- 
lation of attention without securing its essence. 
The principle of " making" objects and ideas 
interesting implies the same divorce between 
object and self. When things have to be made in- 
teresting, it is because interest itself is wanting. 
f oreover, the phrase is a misnomer. The thing, 
ii 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

the object, is no more interesting than it was be- 
fore. The appeal is simply made to the child's 
love of something else. He is excited in a given 
direction, with the hope that somehow or other 
during this excitation he will assimilate some- 
thing otherwise repulsive. There are two types 
of pleasure. One is the accompaniment of activ- 
ity. It is found wherever there is successful 
achievement, mastery, getting on. It is the per- 
sonal phase of an outgoing energy. This sort 
of pleasure is always absorbed in the activity it- 
self. It has no separate existence. This is the 
type of pleasure found in legitimate interest. Its 
source lies in meeting the needs of the organism. 
The other sort of pleasure arises from contact. 
It marks receptivity. Its stimuli are external. 
It exists by itself as a pleasure, not as the pleas- 
ure of activity. Being merely excited by some 
' external stimulus, it is not a quality of any act 
in which an external object is constructively 
dealt with. 

When objects are made interesting, this latter 
type of pleasure comes into play. Advantage is 
taken of the fact that a certain amount of ex- 

12 



UNIFIED VERSUS DIVIDED ACTIVITY 

citation of any organ is pleasurable. The pleasure 
arising is employed to cover the gap between 
self and some fact not in itself having interest. 
The result is division of energies. In the case 
of disagreeable effort the division is simultane- 
ous. In this case, it is successive. Instead of 
having a mechanical, external activity and a ran- 
dom internal activity at the same time, there is 
oscillation of excitement and apathy. The child 
alternates between periods of overstimulation 
and of inertness, as is seen in some so-called 
kindergartens. Moreover, this excitation of any 
particular organ, as eye or ear, by itself, creates 
a further demand for more stimulation of the 
same sort. It is as possible to create an appetite on 
the part of the eye or the ear for pleasurable 
stimulation as it is on the part of taste. Some 
children are as dependent upon the recurrent 
presence of bright colors or agreeable sounds 
as the drunkard is upon his dram. It is this which 
accounts for the distraction and dissipation of 
energy characteristic of such children, for their 
dependence upon external suggestion, and their 
lack of resources when left to themselves. 
13 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

The discussion up to this point may be sum- 
marized as follows: Genuine interest is the ac- 
companiment of the identification, through ac- 
tion, of the self with some object or idea, because 
of the necessity of that object or idea for the 
maintenance of a self -initiated activity. Effort, 
in the sense in which it may be opposed to inter- 
est, implies a separation between the self and 
the fact to be mastered or task to be performed, 
and sets up an habitual division of activities. 
Externally, we have mechanical habits with no 
mental end or value. Internally, we have ran- 
dom energy or mind-wandering, a sequence of 
ideas with no end at all, because they are not 
brought to a focus in action. Interest, in the 
sense in which it is opposed to effort, means 
simply an excitation of the sense organ to give 
pleasure, resulting in strain on one side and list- 
lessness on the other. 

But when we recognize there are certain powers 
within the child urgent for development, needing 
to be acted out in order to secure their own effi- 
ciency and discipline, we have a firm basis upon 
which to build. Effort arises normally in the at- 
14 



UNIFIED VERSUS DIVIDED ACTIVITY 

tempt to give full operation, and thus growth and 
completion, to these powers. Adequately to act 
upon these impulses involves seriousness, absorp- 
tion, defmiteness of purpose ; it results in forma- 
tion of steadiness and persistent habit in the 
service of worthy ends. But this effort never de- 
generates into drudgery, or mere strain of dead 
lift, because interest abides — the self is con- 
cerned throughout. Our first conclusion is that 
interest means a unified activity. 



II 

INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

We now come to our second main topic, the 
psychology of interest. I begin with a brief de- 
scriptive account. Interest is first active, projec- 
tive, or propulsive. We take interest. To be 
interested in any matter is to be actively con- 
cerned with it. Mere feeling regarding a sub- 
ject may be static or inert, but interest is dy- 
namic. Second, it is objective. We say a man has 
many interests to care for or look after. We talk 
about the range of a man's interests, his busi- 
ness interests, local interests, etc. We identify 
interests with concerns or affairs. Interest does 
not end simply in itself, as bare feelings may, 
but is embodied in an object of regard. Third, 
interest is personal ; it signifies a direct concern ; 
a recognition of something at stake, something 
whose outcome is important for the individual. 
It has its emotional as well as its active and ob- 
jective sides. Patent law or electric inventions 
16 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

or politics may be a man's chief interest ; but 
this implies that his personal well-being and satis- 
faction is somehow bound up with the prosperity 
of these affairs. 

These are the various meanings in which com- 
mon sense employs the term interest. The root 
idea of the term seems to be that of being en- 
gaged, engrossed, or entirely taken up with some 
activity because of its recognized worth. The 
etymology of the term inter-esse f "to be be- 
tween," points in the same direction. Interest 
marks the annihilation of the distance between 
the person and the materials and results of his 
action ; it is the sign of their organic union. 1 

i. The active or propulsive phase of interest 

1 It is true that the term interest is also used in a definitely 
disparaging sense. We speak of interest as opposed to prin- 
ciple, of self-interest as a motive to action which regards only 
one's personal advantage; but these are neither the only nor the 
controlling senses in which the term is used. It may fairly be 
questioned whether this is anything but a narrowing or de- 
grading of the legitimate sense of the term. However that 
may be, it appears certain that controversy regarding the use 
of interest arises because one party is using the term in the 
larger, objective sense of recognized value or engrossing ac- 
tivity, while the other is using it as equivalent to a selfish 
motive. 

17 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

takes us back to the consideration of impulse and 
the spontaneous urgencies or tendencies of ac- 
tivity. There is no such thing as absolutely diffuse 
impartial impulse. Impulse is always differen- 
tiated along some more or less specific channel. 
Impulse has its own special lines of discharge. 
The old puzzle about the ass between two bundles 
of hay is only too familiar, but the recognition 
of its fundamental fallacy is not so common. If 
the self were purely passive or purely indifferent, 
waiting upon stimulation from without, then the 
self illustrated in this supposed example would 
remain forever helpless, starving to death, be- 
cause of its equipoise between two sources of 
food. The error lies in assuming any such pas- 
sive condition. One is always already doing 
something, intent on something urgent. And this 
ongoing activity always gives a bent in one direc- 
tion rather than another. The ass, in other words, 
is always already moving toward one bundle 
rather than the other. No amount of physical 
cross-eyedness could induce such mental cross- 
eyedness that the animal would be in a condition 
of equal stimulation from both sides. Wherever 
18 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

there is life there is activity, an activity having 
some tendency or direction of its own. 

In this primitive condition of spontaneous, im- 
pulsive activity we have the basis of natural 
interest. Interest is no more passively waiting 
around to be excited from the outside than is im- 
pulse. In the selective or preferential quality of 
impulse we have the fact that at any given time, 
if we are awake at all, we are always interested 
in one direction rather than another. The con- 
dition either of total lack of interest, or of impar- 
tially distributed interest, is as mythical as the 
story of the ass in scholastic ethics. 

2. The objective side of interest. Every in- 
terest, as already said, attaches itself to an ob- 
ject. The artist is interested in his brushes, in 
his colors, in his technique. The business man 
is interested in the play of supply and demand, 
in the movement of markets, etc. Take whatever 
instance of interest we choose, and we shall find 
that, if we cut out an object about which interest 
clusters, interest itself disappears relapsing into 
empty feeling. 

Error begins in supposing the object already 
19 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

there, and then calling the activity into being. 
Canvas, brushes, and paints interest the artist, 
for example, because they help him discover and 
promote his existing artistic capacity. There is 
nothing in a wheel and a piece of string to arouse 
a child's activity save as they appeal to some in- 
stinct or impulse already active, and supply it 
with means of execution. The number twelve is 
uninteresting when it is a bare, external fact ; it 
has interest (just as has the top or wheelbarrow 
or toy locomotive) when it presents itself as an 
instrument of carrying into effect some dawning 
energy or desire — making a box, measuring 
one's height, etc. And in its difference of degree 
exactly the same principle holds of the most tech- 
nical items of scientific or historic knowledge — 
whatever furthers action, helps mental move- 
ment, is of interest. 

3. We now come to the emotional phase. 
Value is not only objective but also subjective. 
There is not only the thing which is projected as 
valuable or worth while, but there is also appre- 
ciation of its worth. 

The gist of the psychology of interest may, 
20 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

accordingly, be stated as follows : An interest is 
primarily a form of self-expressive activity — 
that is, of growth that comes through acting 
upon nascent tendencies. If we examine this ac- 
tivity on the side of what is done, we get its ob- 
jective features, the ideas, objects, etc., to which 
the interest is attached, about which it clusters. 
If we take into account that it is .^^"-develop- 
ment, that self finds itself in this content, we get 
its emotional or appreciative side. Any account 
of genuine interest must, therefore, grasp it as 
out-going activity holding within its grasp an ob- 
ject of direct value. 

There are cases where action is direct and im- 
mediate. It puts itself forth with no thought of 
anything beyond. It satisfies in and of itself. 
The end is the present activity, and so there is 
no gap in the mind between means and end. All 
play is of this immediate character. Purely 
aesthetic appreciation approximates this type. 
The existing experience holds us for its own 
sake, and we do not demand that it takes us 
into something beyond itself. With the child and 
his ball, the amateur and the hearing of a sym- 

21 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

phony, the present object engrosses. Its value is 
there, and is there in what is directly present. 

On the other hand, we have cases of indirect, 
transferred, or technically speaking, mediated 
interest. Things indifferent or even repulsive in 
themselves often become of interest because of 
assuming relationships and connections of which 
we were previously unaware. Many a student, of 
so-called practical make-up, has found mathe- 
matical theory, once repellent, lit up by great 
attractiveness after studying some form of en- 
gineering in which this theory was a necessary 
tool. The musical score and the technique of 
fingering, in which the child finds no interest 
when it is presented as an end in itself, when it 
is isolated, becomes fascinating when the child 
realizes its place and bearings in helping him 
give better and fuller utterance to his love of 
song. Whether it appeals or fails to appeal is a 
question of relationship. While the little child 
takes only a near view of things, as he grows in 
experience he becomes capable of extending his 
range, and seeing an act, or a thing, or a fact 
not by itself, but as part of a larger whole. If this 

22 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

whole belongs to him, if it is a mode of his own 
movement, then the thing or act which it in- 
cludes gains interest too. 

Here, and here only, have we the reality of the 
idea of "making things interesting." I know of 
no more demoralizing doctrine — when taken 
literally — than the assertion of some of the op- 
ponents of interest that after subject-matter has 
been selected, then the teacher should make it 
interesting. This combines in itself two thorough- 
going errors. On one side, it makes the selection 
of subject-matter a matter quite independent of 
the question of interest — that is to say of the 
child's native urgencies and needs ; and, further, 
it reduces method in instruction to more or less 
external and artificial devices for dressing up the 
unrelated materials, so that they will get some 
hold upon attention. In reality, the principle of 
" making things interesting " means that subjects 
be selected in relation to the child's present ex- 
perience, powers, and needs; and that (in case 
he does not perceive or appreciate this relevancy) 
the new material be presented in such a way as 
to enable the child to appreciate its bearings, its 
23 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

relationships, its value in connection with what 
already has significance for him. It is this bring- 
ing to consciousness of the bearings of the new 
material which constitutes the reality, so often 
perverted both by friend and foe, in "making 
things interesting." 

In other words, the problem is one of intrinsic 
connection as a motive for attention. The teacher 
who tells the child he will be kept after school 
if he doesn't recite his geography lesson better 1 
is appealing to the psychology of mediate inter- 
est. The old English method of rapping knuckles 
for false Latin quantities is one way of arousing 
interest in the intricacies of Latin. To offer a 
child a bribe, or a promise of teacher's affection, 
or promotion to the next grade, or ability to 
make money, or to take a position in society, are 
other modes. They are cases of transferred in- 

1 I have it argued in all seriousness that a child kept after 
school to study has often acquired an interest in arithmetic or 
grammar which he did n't have before, as if this proved the 
efficacy of " discipline " versus interest. Of course, the reality 
is that the greater leisure, the opportunity for individual ex- 
planation afforded, served to bring the material into its proper 
relations in the child's mind — he " got a hold " of it. 

24 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

terest. But the criterion for judging them lies 
just here: How far is one interest externally at- 
tached to another, or substituted for another? 
How far does the new appeal, the new motive, 
serve to interpret, to bring out, to relate the 
material otherwise without interest ? It is a ques- 
tion, again, of inter-esse. The problem may be 
stated as one of the relations of means and end. 
Anything indifferent or repellent becomes of 
interest when seen as a means to an end already 
commanding attention ; or seen as an end that 
will allow means already under control to secure 
further movement and outlet. But, in normal 
growth the interest in means is not externally 
tied on to the interest in an end; it suffuses, 
saturates, and thus transforms it. It interprets 
or revalues it — gives it a new significance. The 
man who has a wife and family has thereby a 
new motive for his daily work — he sees a new 
meaning in it, and takes into it a steadiness and 
enthusiasm previously lacking. But when he does 
his day's work as a thing intrinsically disagree- 
able, as drudgery, simply for the sake of the final 
wage-reward, the case is quite different. Means 
25 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

and end remain remote ; they do not permeate 
one another. The person is no more really in- 
terested in his work than he was before ; in 
itself, it is a hardship to be escaped from. Hence 
he cannot give full attention to it ; he cannot put 
himself unreservedly into it. But to the othei 
man every stroke of work may literally mean his 
wife and baby. Externally, physically, they are 
remote; mentally, with respect to his plan of 
living, they are one ; they have the same value. 
In drudgery on the contrary means and end re- 
main as separate in consciousness as they are in 
space and time. -What is true of this is true of 
every attempt in teaching to "create interest" 
by appeal to external motives. 

At the opposite scale, take a case of artistic 
construction. The sculptor has his end, his ideal, 
in view. To realize that end he must go through 
a series of intervening steps which are not, on 
their face, equivalent to the end. He must model 
and mold and chisel ; perform a series of particu- 
lar acts, no one of which exhibits or is the beau- 
tiful form he has in mind, and every one of which 
represents the putting forth of personal energy. 
26 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

But because these are necessary means in 
the achieving of his activity, the meaning of 
the finished form is transferred over into these 
special acts. Each molding of the clay, each 
stroke of the chisel, is for him at the time the 
whole end in process of realization. Whatever 
interest or value attaches to the end attaches to 
each of these steps. He is as much absorbed in 
one as in the other. Any failure in this complete 
identification means an inartistic product, means 
that he is not really interested in his ideal. Upon 
the other hand, his interest is in the end regarded 
as an end of the particular processes which are 
its means. Interest attaches to it because of its 
place in the active process of what it is but 
the culmination. He may also regret the ap- 
proach of the day that will put an end to such 
an interesting piece of work. At all events, 
it is not the mere external product that holds 
him. 

We have spoken freely of means and ends be- 
cause these terms are in common use. We must, 
however, analyze them somewhat to make sure 
they are not misunderstood. The terms " means " 
27 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

and "end" apply primarily to the position occu- 
pied by acts as stages of a single developing ac- 
tivity, and only secondarily to things or objects. 
The end really means the final stage of an activity, 
its last or terminal period ; the means are the 
earlier phases, those gone through before the ac- 
tivity reaches its termination. This is plainly seen 
in, say, the leisurely eating of a meal, as distinct 
from rushing through it to have it over as soon as 
possible ; in the playing of the game of ball, in 
listening to a musical theme. In each case there 
is a definite outcome ; after the meal is eaten, there 
is a certain amount of food in the system ; when 
the nine innings of the game of baseball are ended, 
one side or the other has won. Henceforth — 
afterwards — it is possible to separate the exter- 
nal result from the process, from the continuous 
activity which led up to it. Afterwards we 
tend to separate the result from the process ; to 
regard the result of the process as the end and 
the whole process as simply a means to the ex- 
ternal result. But in civilized society, eating is 
not merely a means to getting so much food- 
power into the system ; it is a social process, a 
28 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

time of family and friendly reunion ; moreover, 
each course of the meal has its own enjoyment 
just as a matter of partaking of food, that is, of 
an active continuing process. Division into means 
and end hardly has any meaning. Each stage of 
the entire process has its own adequate signifi- 
cance or interest ; the earlier quite as much as 
the latter. Even here, however, there is a tend- 
ency to keep the best till the last — the dessert 
comes at the end. That is, there is a tendency to 
make the last stage a fulfilling or consummating 
stage. 

In the hearing of the musical theme, the earlier 
stages are far from being mere means to the 
later ; they give the mind a certain set and dis- 
pose it to anticipate later developments. So the 
end, the conclusion, is not a mere last thing in 
time ; it completes what has gone before ; it 
settles, so to speak, the character of the theme 
as a whole. In the ball game, the interest may 
intensify with every passing stage of the game ; 
the last inning finally settles who wins and who 
loses, a matter which up to that time has been in 
suspense or doubt. In the game, the last stage 
29 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

is not only the last in time, but also settles the 
character of the entire game, and so gives mean- 
ing to all that has preceded. Nevertheless the 
earlier parts of the game are true parts of the 
game ; they are not mere means for reaching a 
last inning. 

In these illustrations we have seen how the 
last stage may be the fulfilling, the completing, 
or consummating of all that has gone before, and 
may thus decide the nature of the activity as a 
whole. In no case, however, is the end equiva- 
lent simply to an external result. The mere fact 
that one side won — the external result or object 
— is of no significance apart from the game 
whose conclusion it marks. Just so, we may say 
that the value of x in an algebraic equation is 5. 
But to say in general that x equals 5 is nonsense. 
This result is significant only as the outcome of 
a particular process of solving a particular equa- 
tion. If, however, the mathematical inquiry is 
carried on to deal with other connected equa- 
tions, it is possible to separate the result, 5, from 
what led up to it, and in further calculating to 
use 5 independently of the equation whose solu* 
30 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

tion it was. This fact introduces a further com- 
plication. 

Many, most, of our activities, are intercon- 
nected. We not only have the process of eating 
the meal, but we have the further use of the food 
eaten — its assimilation and transformation into 
energy for new operations. The musical theme 
heard may represent a step in a more continuous 
process of musical education. The outcome of 
the game may be a factor in determining the 
relative standing of two clubs in a series of con- 
tests. An inventor of a new telephonic de- 
vice is preoccupied with the different steps of 
the process ; but when the invention is com- 
pleted, it becomes a factor in a different set of 
activities. When the artist has finished his pic- 
ture, his question may be how to sell that picture 
so as to get a living for his family. This fact of 
the employment of the result of one course of 
action as a readymade factor in some other course 
leads us to think of means and ends as fixed 
things external to an activity, and to think of the 
whole activity as a mere means to an external 
product. The ball game is thus thought of as a 
3i 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

mere means to winning, and that winning in turn 
as a mere means to winning a series. Winning 
the series may in turn be regarded as a mere 
means of getting a sum of money or a certain 
amount of glory, and so on indefinitely. Unless 
discussion is to get confused, we must therefore 
carefully distinguish between two senses of the 
term end. While the activity is in progress, 
"end" simply means an object as standing for 
the culminating stage of the whole process ; it 
represents the need of looking ahead and con- 
sidering what we are now doing so that it will 
lead as simply and effectively as possible into 
what is to be done later. After the activity has 
come to its conclusion, " end " means the prod- 
uct accomplished as a fixed thing. The same 
considerations apply to the term " means. "« Dur- 
ing the activity it signifies simply the materials 
or ways of acting involved in the successive 
stages of the growth of an activity up to its ful- 
fillment. 'After the activity is accomplished, its 
product as detached from the action that led up 
to it may be used as a means for achieving some- 
thing else. 

32 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

This distinction is not a merely theoretical 
one, but one that affects the whole scope and 
significance of interest in teaching. The purely- 
adventitious interests we have discussed — mak- 
ing a thing interesting by the sugar-coating 
method — assumes a certain ready subject-mat- 
ter — a subject-matter existing wholly independ- 
ently of the pupil's own activity. It then asks 
how this alien subject-matter may be introduced 
into the pupil's mind; how his attention may 
be drawn away from the things with which it 
is naturally concerned and drawn to this in- 
different, readymade external material. Some 
interest, some bond of connection, must be 
found. Prevalent practices and the training and 
disposition of the teacher will decide whether 
the methods of "hard" or of "soft" pedagogy 
shall be resorted to; whether we shall have a 
"soup-kitchen" type of teaching or a "peni- 
tentiary " type. Shall the indifferent thing (indif- 
ferent because lying outside of the individual's 
scheme of activities) be made interesting — by 
clothing it with adventitious traits that are agree- 
able; or by methods of threats — by making 
33 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

attention to it less disagreeable than the con- 
sequences of non-attention so that study is a 
choice of the lesser of two evils ? 

Both of these methods, however, represent 
failure to ask the right question and to seek for 
the right method of solution. What course of ac- 
tivity exists already (by native endowment or by 
past achievement) operative in the pupil's experi- 
ence with respect to which the thing to be learned, 
the mode of skill to be acquired, is either a means 
or an endf What line of action is there, that is 
to say, which can be carried forward to its ap- 
propriate termination better by noting and using 
the subject-matter? Or what line of action is 
there, which can be directed so that when car- 
ried to its completion it will naturally terminate 
in the things to be learned ? The mistake, once 
more, consists in overlooking the activities in 
which the child is already engaged, or in assum- 
ing that they are so trivial or so irrelevant that 
they have no significance for education. When 
they are duly taken into account the new sub- 
ject-matter is interesting on its own account in 
the degree in which it enters into their operation. 
34 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

The mistake lies in treating these existing activ- 
ities as if they had reached their limit of growth ; 
as if they were satisfactory in their present shape 
and simply something to be excited; or else just 
unsatisfactory and something to be repressed. 

The distinction between means and ends ex- 
ternal to a process of action and those intrinsic 
to it enables us to understand the difference be- 
tween pleasures and happiness. In the degree 
in which anybody externally happens to fall upon 
anything and to be excited agreeably by it, pleas- 
ure results. The question of pleasure is a ques- 
tion of the immediate or momentary reaction. 
Happiness differs in quality from both a pleasure 
and a series of pleasures. Children are almost 
always happy, joyous — and so are grown people 
— when engaged consecutively in any uncon- 
strained mode of activity — when they are occu- 
pied, busy. The emotional accompaniment of the 
progressive growth of a course of action, a con- 
tinual movement of expansion and of achieve- 
ment, is happiness; — mental content or peace, 
which when emphatic, is called joy, delight. 
Persons, children or adults, are interested in what 
35 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

they can do successfully, in what they approach 
with confidence and engage in with a sense of 
accomplishment. Such happiness or interest is 
not self-conscious or selfish ; it is a sign of devel- 
oping power and of absorption in what is being 
done. Only when an activity is monotonous does 
happiness cease to attend its performance, and 
monotony means that growth, development, have 
ceased ; nothing new is entering in to carry an 
activity forward. On the other hand, lack of 
normal occupations brings uneasiness, irritability, 
and demand for any kind of stimulation which 
will arouse activity — a state that easily passes 
into a longing for excitement, for its own sake. 
Healthy children in a healthy family or social 
environment do not ask, "What pleasure can 
I have now? " but " What can I do now? " The 
demand is for a growing activity, an occupation, 
an interest. Given that, happiness will take care 
of itself. 

\ There is no rigid, insurmountable line between 
direct and indirect interest. As an activity grows 
more complex, it involves more factors. A child 
who is simply building with blocks has an activity 

36 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

of very short time span ; his end is just ahead of 
what he is doing at the moment — namely, to 
keep on building so that his pile grows higher — 
does not tumble down. It makes no difference 
to him just what he makes, as long as it stands 
up. When the pile tumbles, he is content to 
start over again. But when he aims at some- 
thing more complicated, the erection of a certain 
kind of structure with his blocks, the increased 
complexity of the end gives the cycle of his ac- 
tions a longer time span ; arrival at its end is 
postponed. He must do more things before he 
reaches his result, and accordingly he must carry 
that result in mind for a longer time as a control of 
his actions from moment to moment. Gradually 
this situation passes over into one where an 
immediate activity would make no appeal at all 
were it not for some more remote end which is 
valuable and for the sake of which intervening 
means, not of themselves of concern, are impor- 
tant. With trained adults an end in the distant 
future, a result to be reached only after a term 
of years, may stimulate and regulate a long series 
of difficult intervening steps which, in isolation 
37 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

from the thought of the end, would be matters 
of total indifference, or even repellent. j From 
this side, then, the development of indirect in- 
terests is simply a sign of the growth or expan- 
sion of simple activities into more complex ones, 
requiring longer and longer periods of time 
for their execution, and consequently involving 
postponement of achieving the end which gives 
decisive meaning and full worth to the interven- 
ing steps. 

Not only, however, does the direct interest in 
an object pass thus gradually and naturally into 
indirect interest as the scope of action is pro- 
longed, but the reverse process takes place. ( In-^ ' 
direct values become direct. Everybody has heard 
of the man who at first is interested in an ac- 
quisition of money because of what he can do 
with it and who finally becomes so absorbed in 
the mere possessing of gold that he gloats over 
it. This clearly expresses an undesirable instance 
of the change of means into end. But normal 
and desirable changes of the same kind are fre- 
quent. Pupils who are first interested in, say, 
number relations, because of what they can do 

38 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

with these relations in making something else 
(at first interested, that is, in a branch of arith- 
metic simply as a means or tool), may become 
fascinated by what they can do with number on 
its own account. 1 

Boys who are at first interested in skill in play- 
ing marbles or ball simply because it is a factor in 
a game which interests them, become interested 
in practicing the acts of shooting at a mark, of 
throwing, catching, etc., and so arduously devote 
themselves to the perfecting of skill. The tech- 
nical exercises that give skill in the game be- 
come themselves a sort of a game. Girls who are 
interested in making clothes for a doll, simply 
for the sake of the interest in playing with dolls, 
may develop an interest in making clothes till the 
doll itself becomes simply a sort of an excuse, or 
at least just a stimulus, for making clothes. 

If the reader will reflect upon his own course 
of life over a certain period of time, he will find 
that the sort of thing which is somewhat trivially 
illustrated in these examples is of constant oc- 

1 In our usual terminology interest in " concrete " number 
passes into an interest in " abstract " number. 

39 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

currence. He will find that wherever his activ- 
ities have grown in extent and range of meaning 
(instead of becoming petrified and fossilized), 
one or other (or both) of two things has been 
going on. On the one hand, narrower and simpler 
types of interest (requiring a shorter time for 
their realization) have been expanding to cover 
a longer time. With this change they have grown 
richer and fuller. They have grown to include 
many things previously indifferent or even re- 
pulsive as the value of the end now takes up into 
itself the value of whatever is involved in the 
process of achieving it. On the other hand, many 
things, that were first of significance only be- 
cause they were needed as parts of an activity 
of interest only as a whole, have become valued 
on their own account. Sometimes it will even 
be found that they have displaced entirely the 
type of activity in connection with which they 
originally grew up. This is just what happens 
when children outgrow interests that have pre- 
viously held them ; as when boys feel it is now 
beneath them to play marbles and girls find 
themselves no longer interested in their dolls. 
40 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

Looked at superficially, the original interest 
seems simply to have been crowded out or left 
behind; Examined more carefully, it will be found 
that activities and objects at first esteemed simply 
because of their place within the original activ- 
ity have grown to be of more account than that 
for the sake of which they were at first enter- 
tained. In many cases, unless the simpler and 
seemingly more trivial interest had had sway 
at the proper time, the later more important 
and specialized activity would not have arisen. 
And this same process can be verified in adult 
development as well, as long as development goes 
on. When it ceases, arrest of growth sets in. 
' "~ We are now in a position to restate, in a more 
significant way, the true and the false ways of 
understanding the function of interest in educa- 
tion, and to formulate a criterion for judging 
whether the principle of interest is being rightly 
or wrongly employed. Interest is normal and 
reliance upon it educationally legitimate in the 
degree in which the activity in question involves 
I growth or development. Interest is illegitimately 
used in the degree in which it is either a symp- 
41 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

torn or a cause of arrested development in an 
activity. 

These formulae are of course abstract and far 
from self-explanatory. But in the light of our prior 
discussion their significance should be obvious. 
When interest is objected to as merely amuse- 
ment or fooling or a temporary excitation (or 
when in educational practice it does mean simply 
such things), it will be found that the interest in 
question is something which attaches merely to a 
momentary activity apart from its place in an 
enduring activity — an activity that develops 
through a period of time. When this happens, 
the object that arouses (what is called) interest 
is esteemed just on the basis of the momentary 
reaction it calls out, the immediate pleasure it 
excites. " Interest " so created is abnormal, for 
it is a sign of the dissipation of energy ; it is a 
symptom that life is being cut up into a series 
of disconnected reactions, each one of which is 
esteemed by itself apart from what it does in 
carrying forward (or developing) a consecutive 
activity. As we have already seen, it is one 
thing to make, say, number interesting by merely 
42 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

attaching to it other things that happen to call 
out a pleasurable reaction ; it is a radically differ- 
ent sort of thing to make it interesting by intro- 
ducing it so that it functions as a genuine means 
of carrying on a more inclusive activity. In the 
latter case, interest does not mean the excita- 
tion due to the association of some other thing 
irrelevant to number ; it means that number is of 
interest because it has a function in the further- 
ance of a continuous or enduring line of activity. 
Our conclusion, then, is not simply that some 
interests are good while others are bad ; but that 
true interests are signs that some material, ob- 
ject, mode of skill (or whatever) is appreciated 
on the basis of what it actually does in carrying 
to fulfillment some mode of action with which a 
person has identified himself. Genuine interest, 
in short, simply means that a person has identi- 
fied himself with, or has found himself in, a 
certain course of action. Consequently he is 
identified with whatever objects and forms of skill 
are involved in the successful prosecution of that 
course. This course of action may cover greater 
or shorter time according to circumstances, par- 
43 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

ticularly according to the experience and ma- 
turity of the person concerned. It is absurd to 
expect a young child to be engaged in an activity 
as complex as that of an older child, or the older 
child as in that of an adult. But some expansion, 
enduring through some length of time, is entailed. 
Even a baby interested in hitting a saucer with a 
spoon is not concerned with a purely momen- 
tary reaction and excitation. The hitting is con- 
nected with the sound to follow, and has interest 
on that account ; and the resulting sound has in- 
terest not in its isolation, but as a consequence 
of the striking. An activity of such a short span 
forms a direct interest, and spontaneous play ac- 
tivities in general are of this sort. For (to repeat 
what has already been said) in such cases it is 
not necessary to bear the later and fulfilling 
activities in mind in order to keep the earlier 
activities agoing and to direct their manner of 
performance and their order or sequence. But 
the more elaborate the action, the longer the 
time required by the activity; the longer the 
time, the more the consummating or fulfilling 
stage is postponed ; and the longer the postpone- 
44 



INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

ment, the greater the opportunity for the inter- 
est in the end to come into conflict with interest 
in intervening steps. 

The next step in the discussion consists in 
seeing that effort comes into play in the de- 
gree in which achievement of an activity is post- 
poned or remote ; and that the significance of 
situations demanding effort is their connection 
with thought. 



Ill 

EFFORT, THINKING, AND MOTIVATION 

What is it that we really prize under the name 
of effort ? What is it that we are really trying to 
secure when we regard increase in ability to put 
forth effort as an aim of education ? Taken prac- 
tically, there is no great difficulty in answering. 
What we are after is persistency, consecutiveness, 
of activity: endurance against obstacles and 
through hindrances. Effort regarded as mere in- 
crease of strain in the expenditure of energy is not 
in itself a thing we esteem. Barely in itself it is a 
thing we would avoid. A child is lifting a weight 
that is too heavy for him. It takes an increas- 
ing amount of effort, involving increase of strain 
which is increasingly painful, to lift it higher and 
higher. The wise parent tries to protect the child 
from mere strain ; from the danger of excessive 
fatigue, of damaging the structures of the body, 
of getting bruises. Effort as mere strained activ- 
ity is thus not what we prize. On the other hand, 
46 



EFFORT, THINKING, AND MOTIVATION 

a judicious parent will not like to see a child too 
easily discouraged by meeting obstacles. If the 
child is physically healthy, surrender of a course 
of action, or diversion of energy to some easier 
line of action, is a bad symptom if it shows itself 
at the first sign of resistance. The demand for 
effort is a demand for continuity in the face of 
difficulties. 

This account of the matter is so obvious as to 
lie upon the surface. When we examine into it 
further, however, we find it only repeats what we 
have already learned in connection with interest 
as an accompaniment of an expanding activity. 
Effort, like interest, is significant only in con- 
nection with a course of action, an action that 
takes time for its completion since it develops 
through a succession of stages. Apart from an 
end to be reached, effort would never be anything 
more than a momentary strain or a succession of 
such strains. It would be a thing to be avoided, 
not so much for its disagreeableness as because 
nothing comes of it save exposure to dangers of 
exhaustion and accident But where the action 
is a developing or growing one, effort, willing- 
47 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

ness to put forth energy at any point of the entire 
activity, measures the hold which the activity, 
as one whole affair, has upon a person. It shows 
how much he really cares for it. We never (if 
we are sensible) take, in ourselves or in some- 
body else, the " will for the deed " unless there 
is evidence that there really was a will, a purpose ; 
and the sole evidence is some striving to realize 
the purpose, the putting forth of effort. If condi- 
tions forbid all effort, it is not a question of " will" 
at all, but simply of a sympathetic wish. 

This does not mean, of course, that effort is 
always desirable under such conditions. On the 
contrary, the game may not be worth the candle ; 
the end to be reached may not be of sufficient 
importance to justify the expenditure of so much 
energy, or of running the risks of excessive strain. 
Judgment comes in to decide such matters, and 
speaking generally it is as much a sign of bad 
judgment to keep on at all costs in an activity 
once entered upon, as it is a sign of weak- 
ness to be turned from it at the first evidence 
of difficulties. The principle laid down shows 
that effort is significant not as bare effort, or 
48 



EFFORT, THINKING, AND MOTIVATION 

strain, but in connection with carrying forward an 
activity to its fulfillment : it all depends, as we 
say, upon the end. 

Two considerations follow, (i) On the one 
hand, when an activity persists in spite of its tem- 
porary blocking by an obstacle, there is a situation 
of mental stress, : a peculiar emotional condition of 
combined desire and aversion. The end continues 
to make an appeal, and to hold one to the activ- 
ity in spite of its interruption by difficulties. This 
continued forward appeal gives desire. The ob- 
stacle, on the other hand, in the degree in which 
it arrests or thwarts progress ahead, inhibits ac- 
tion, and tends to divert it into some other chan- 
nel — to avert action, in other words, from the 
original end. This gives aversion. Effort, as a 
mental experience, is precisely this peculiar com- 
bination of conflicting tendencies — tendencies 
away from and tendencies towards : dislike and 
longing. 

(2) The other consideration is even more im- 
portant, for it decides what happens. The emo- 
tion of effort, or of stress, is a warning to think, 
49 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

to consider, to reflect, to inquire, to look into the 
matter. Is the end worthwhile under the circum- 
stances? Is there not some other course which, 
under the circumstances, is better? So far as this 
reconsideration takes place, the situation is quite 
different from that of a person merely giving 
up as soon as an obstacle shows itself. Even 
if the final decision is to give up, the case is 
radically different from the case of giving up 
from mere instability of purpose. The giving 
up now involves an appeal to reason, and may 
be quite consistent with tenacity of purpose or 
"strength of will." However, reflection may take 
quite another course : it may lead not to re- 
consideration of ends, but to seeking for new 
means ; in short, to discovery and invention also. 
The child who cannot carry the stone that he 
wishes may neither keep on in a fruitless strug- 
gle to achieve the impossible, nor yet surrender 
his purpose; he may be led to think of some other 
way of getting the stone into motion ; he may 
try prying it along with a bar. " Necessity is the 
mother of invention." 

In the latter case, the obstacle has, indeed, 
5o 



EFFORT, THINKING, AND MOTIVATION 

diverted energy ; but the significant thing is that 
energy is diverted into thinking; into an intelli- 
gent consideration of the situation and of available 
ways and means. The really important matter in 
the experience of effort concerns its connection 
with thought. The question is not the amount of 
sheer strain involved, but the way in which the 
thought of an end persists in spite of difficul- 
ties, and induces a person to reflect upon the na- 
ture of the obstacles and the available resources 
by which they may be dealt with. 

A person, child or adult, comes, in the course 
of an activity, up against some obstacle or diffi- 
culty. This experience of resistance has a double 
effect; — though in a given case one effect may 
predominate and obscure the other. One effect 
is weakening of the impetus in the forward direc- 
tion ; the existing line of action becomes more or 
less uncongenial because of the strain required 
to overcome difficulties. As a consequence, the 
tendency is to give up this line of action and to 
divert energy into some other channel. On the 
other hand, meeting an obstacle may enhance a 
person's perception of an end; may make him 
5i 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

realize more clearly than ever he did before how 
much it means to him ; and accordingly may 
brace him, invigorate him in his effort to achieve 
the end. Within certain limits, resistance only 
arouses energy ; it acts as a stimulus. Only a 
spoiled child or pampered adult is dismayed or 
discouraged and turned aside, instead of being 
aroused, by lions in the path — unless the lions 
are very fierce and threatening. It is not too 
much to say that a normal person demands a cer- 
tain amount of difficulty to surmount in order 
that he may have a full and vivid sense of what 
he is about, and hence have a lively interest in 
what he is doing. 

Meeting obstacles makes a person project 
more definitely to himself the later and consum- 
mating period of his activity ; it brings the end 
of his course of action to consciousness. He now 
thinks of what he is doing, instead of doing it 
blindly from instinct or habit. The result becomes 
a conscious aim, a guiding and inspiring purpose. 
In being an object of desire, it is also an object 
of endeavor. 

This arousing and guiding function is exer- 
52 



EFFORT, THINKING, AND MOTIVATION 

cised in two ways. Endeavor is steadied and made 
more persistent when its outcome is regarded as 
something to be achieved; and thought is stimu- 
lated to discover the best methods of dealing 
with the situation. The person who keeps on 
blindly pushing against an obstacle, trying to 
break through by main strength, is the one who 
acts unintelligently ; the one who does not pre- 
sent to himself the nature of the end to be 
reached. He remains on the level of a struggling 
animal, who by mere quantity of brute strength 
tries to break down resistance and win to his goal. 
The true function of the conditions that call 
forth effort is, then, first, to make an individual 
more conscious of the end and purpose of his 
actions ; secondly, to turn his energy from blind, 
or thoughtless, struggle into reflective judgment. 
These two phases of thought are interdependent. 
The thought of the result, the end as a conscious 
guiding purpose, leads to the search for means 
of achievement; it suggests appropriate courses 
of action to be tried. These means as considered 
and attempted supply a fuller content to the 
thought of the end. A boy starts somewhat 
53 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

blindly to make a kite ; in the course of his oper- 
ations he comes across unexpected difficulties; 
his kite does n't hold together, or it won't balance. 
Unless his activity has a slight hold upon him, 
he is thereby made aware more definitely of just 
what he intends to make ; he conceives the object 
and end of his actions more distinctly and fully. 
His end is now not just a kite, but some special 
kind of a kite. Then he inquires what is the mat- 
ter, what is the trouble, with his existing con- 
struction, and searches for remedial measures. 
As he does this, his thought of the kite as a com- 
plete whole becomes more adequate; then he 
sees his way more clearly what to do to make 
the kite, and so on. 

We are now in possession of a criterion for 
estimating the place in an educative development 
of difficulties and of effort. If one mean by a task 
simply an undertaking involving difficulties that 
have to be overcome, then children, youth, and 
adults alike require tasks in order that there may 
be continued development. But if one mean by a 
task something that has no interest, makes no 
appeal, that is wholly alien and hence uncongenial, 
54 



EFFORT, THINKING, AND MOTIVATION 

the matter is quite different. Tasks in the former 
sense are educative because they supply an in- 
dispensable stimulus to thinking, to reflective 
inquiry. Tasks in the latter sense signify noth- 
ing but sheer strain, constraint, and the need of 
some external motivation for keeping at them. 
They are ^educative because they fail to intro- 
duce a clearer consciousness of ends and a search 
for proper means of realization. They are mis- 
educative, because they deaden and stupefy; 
they lead to that confused and dulled state of 
mind that always attends an action carried on 
without a realizing sense of what it is all about. 
They are also miseducative because they lead to 
dependence upon external ends ; the child works 
simply because of the pressure of the taskmaster, 
and diverts his energies just in the degree in 
which this pressure is relaxed ; or he works be- 
cause of some alien inducement — to get some 
reward that has no intrinsic connection with 
what he is doing. 

The question to be borne in mind is, then, two- 
fold : Is this person doing something too easy 
for him — something which has not a sufficient 
55 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

element of resistance to arouse his energies, es- 
pecially his energies of thinking ? Or is the work 
assigned so difficult that he has not the resources 
required in order to cope with it — so alien to 
his experience and his acquired habits that he 
does not know where or how to take hold ? Be- 
tween these two questions lies the teacher's task 
— for the teacher has a problem as well as the 
pupil. How shall the activities of pupils be pro- 
gressively complicated by the introduction of 
difficulties, and yet these difficulties be of a nature 
to stimulate instead of dulling and merely dis- 
couraging ? The judgment, the tact, the intellec- 
tual sympathy of instructors is taxed to the ut- 
termost in answering these questions in the con- 
crete with respect to the various subjects of 
study. 

When an activity is too easy and simple, a 
person either engages in it because of the im- 
mediate pleasurable excitement it awakens, or 
he puts just enough of his powers upon it — their 
purely mechanical and physical side — to per- 
form what is required in a perfunctory way, while 
he lets his mind wander to other things where 

5 6 



EFFORT, THINKING, AND MOTIVATION 

there is at least enough novelty to keep his fan- 
cies going. Strange as it may seem to say it, one 
of the chief objections both to mechanical drill 
work and to the assigning of subject-matter too 
difficult for pupils is that the only activity to 
which they actually incite the pupils is in lines 
too easy for them. Only the powers already 
formed, the habits already fixed, are called into 
play ; the mind — the power of thinking — is 
not called into action. Hence apathy in chil- 
dren naturally sluggish, or mind-wandering in 
children of a more imaginative nature. What 
happens when work too difficult, work beyond 
the limits of capacity, is insisted upon? If the 
teacher is professionally skilled, a pupil will not 
be able entirely to shirk or to escape. He 
must keep up the form of attentive study, and 
produce a result as evidence of having been oc- 
cupied. Naturally he seeks short cuts; he does 
what he can do without recourse to processes 
of thinking that are beyond him. Any external 
and routine device is employed to "get the 
answer" — possibly surreptitious aid from others 
or downright cheating. Any way, he does what 
57 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

is already easiest for him to do ; he follows the 
line of least resistance. The sole alternative 
is the use of initiative in thinking out the con- 
ditions of the problem and the way to go at it. 
And this alternative is within his reach only 
when the work to be done is of a nature to 
make an appeal to him, or to enlist his powers ; 
and when the difficulties are such as to stimu- 
late instead of depressing. 

'Good teaching, in other words, is teaching that 
appeals to established powers while it includes 
such new material as will demand their redirection 
for a new end, this redirection requiring thought 
— intelligent effort. In every case, the educa- 
tional significance of effort, its value for an 
educative growth, resides in its connection 
with a stimulation of greater thoughtfulness, 
not in the greater strain it imposes. Educative 
effort is a sign of the transformation of a com- 
paratively blind activity (whether impulsive or 
habitual) into a more consciously reflective 
one. 

For the sake of completeness of statement, 
we will say (what hardly should now require 
58 



EFFORT, THINKING, AND MOTIVATION 

statement on its own account) that such effort is 
in no sense a foe of interest. It is a part of the 
process of growth of activity from direct interest 
to indirect. In our previous section, we considered 
this development as meaning an increase of the 
complexity of an activity (that is, of the number 
of factors involved), and the increased impor- 
tance of its outcome as a motive, in spite of con- 
trary appeals, for devotion to intervening means. 
In this section, we have brought out more em- 
phatically the fact that along with this increasing 
remoteness of the end (the longer period required 
for the consummation of an activity) goes a 
greater number of difficulties to be overcome, 
and the consequent need of effort. And our 
conclusion has been that the effort needed is 
secured when the activity in question is of such ]/ 
positive and abiding interest as to arouse the 
person to clearer recognition of purpose and to 
a more thoughtful consideration of means of 
accomplishment. The educator who associates 
difficulties and effort with increased depth and 
scope of thinking will never go far wrong. The 
one who associates it with sheer strain, sheer 
59 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

dead lift of energy, will never understand either 
how to secure the needed effort when it is 
needed nor the best way to utilize the energy 
aroused. 

It remains to apply what has been said to the 
question of motivation. " Motive" is the name 
for the end or aim in respect to its hold on action, 
its power to move. It is one thing to speculate idly 
upon possible results, to keep them before the 
mind in a purely theoretical way. It is another 
thing for the results contemplated or projected 
to be so desired that the thought of them stirs 
endeavor. " Motive " is a name for the end in its 
active or dynamic capacity. It would be mere 
repetition of our previous analysis to show that 
this moving power expresses the extent to which 
the end foreseen is bound up with an activity 
with which the self is identified. It is enough to 
note that the motive force of an end and the 
interest that the end possesses are equivalent ex- 
pressions of the vitality and depth of a proposed 
course of activity. 

A word of warning may be in place against 
taking the idea of motivation in too personal a 
60 



EFFORT, THINKING, AND MOTIVATION 

sense, in a sense too detached, that is, from the 
object or end in view. In the theory of instruc- 
tion, as distinct from its practice, the need of 
motivation was for a long time overlooked or 
even denied. It was assumed that sheer force of 
will, arbitrary effort, was alone required. In prac- 
tice this meant (as we have seen) appeal to extrane- 
ous sources of motivation : to reverence for the 
authority of teacher or text ; to fear of punish- 
ment or the displeasure of others ; to regard for 
success in adult life; to winning a prize; to 
standing higher than one's fellows; to fear of 
not being promoted, etc. The next step was taken 
when some educators recognized the ineffective 
hold of such motives upon many pupils — their 
lack of adequate motivating force in the concrete. 
They looked for motives which would have more 
weight with the average pupil. But too often they 
still conceived the motive as outside the subject- 
matter, something existing purely in the feelings, 
and giving a reason for attention to a matter that 
in itself would not provide a motive. They looked 
for a motive for the study or the lesson, instead 
of a motive in it. Some reason must be found in 
61 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

the person, apart from the arithmetic or the 
geography or the manual activity, that might be 
attached to the lesson material so as to give it 
a leverage, or moving force. 

One effect was to substitute a discussion of 
" motives " in the abstract for a consideration of 
subject-matter in the concrete. The tendency 
was to make out a list of motives or " interests " 
by which children in general or children of a 
given age are supposed to be actuated, and then 
to consider how these might be linked up with 
the various lessons so as to impart efficacy to 
the latter. The important question, however, 
is what specific subject-matter is so connected with 
the growth of the child's existing concrete capabil- 
ities as to give it a moving force. What is needed 
is not an inventory of personal motives which we 
suppose children to have, but a consideration of 
their powers, their tendencies in action, and the 
ways in which these can be carried forward by a 
given subject-matter. 

If a child has, for example, an artistic capacity 
in the direction of music or drawing, it is not 
necessary to find a motive for its exercise. The 
62 



EFFORT, THINKING, AND MOTIVATION 

problem is not to find a motive, but to find ma- 
terial of and conditions for its exercise. Any- 
material that appeals to this capacity has by 
that very fact motivating force. The end or object 
in its vital connection with the person's activities 
is a motive. 

Another consequence of a too personal concep- 
tion of motivation is a narrow and external con- 
ception of use and function. It is justifiable to 
ask for the utility of any educational subject- 
matter. But use may be estimated from different 
standpoints. We may have a readymade concep- 
tion of use or function, and try the value of what 
is learned by its conformity to this standard. In 
this case we shall not regard any pursuit as prop- 
erly motivated, unless we see that it performs 
some special office that we have laid down as 
useful or practical. But if we start from the 
standpoint of the active powers of the children 
concerned, we shall measure the utility of new 
subject-matter and new modes of skill by the 
way in which they promote the growth of these 
powers. We shall not insist upon tangible ma- 
terial products, nor upon what is learned being 

63 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

put to further use at once in some visible way, 
nor even demand evidence that the children 
have become morally improved in some respect : 
save as the growth of powers is itself a moral 
gain. 



IV 

TYPES OF EDUCATIVE INTEREST 

The clew we have followed in our discussion of 
interest is its connection with an activity engag- 
ing a person in a whole-hearted way. Interest is 
not some one thing ; it is a name for the fact that 
a course of action, an occupation, or pursuit ab- 
sorbs the powers of an individual in a thorough- 
going way. But an activity cannot go on in a void. 
It requires material, subject-matter, conditions 
upon which to operate. On the other hand, it re- 
quires certain tendencies, habits, powers on the 
part of the self. I Wherever there is genuine in- 
terest, there is an identification of these two 
things. The person acting finds his own well-being 
bound up with the development of an object to its 
own issue. If the activity goes a certain way, then 
a subject-matter is carried to a certain result, and 
a person achieves a certain satisfaction. 

There is nothing new or striking in the con- 
ception of activity as an important educational 

65 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

principle. In the form of the idea of " self-ac- 
tivity " in particular, it has long been a name for 
the ultimate educational ideal. But activity has 
often been interpreted in too formal and too in- 
ternal a sense, and hence has remained a barren 
ideal without influence on practice; sometimes 
it becomes a mere phrase, receiving the homage 
of the lips only. To make the idea of activity 
effective, we must take it broadly enough to 
cover all the doings that involve growth of power 
— especially of power to realize the meaning of 
what is done. This excludes action done under 
external constraint or dictation, for this has no 
significance for the mind of him who performs it. 
It excludes also mere random reaction to an ex- 
citation that is finished when the momentary act 
has ceased — which does not, in other words, 
carry the person acting into future broader fields. 
It also excludes action so habitual that it has be- 
come routine or mechanical. Unfortunately action 
from external constraint, for mere love of excite- 
ment and from mechanical force of habit are 
so common that these exceptions cover much 
ground. But the ground lying within these ex- 
66 



TYPES OF EDUCATIVE INTEREST 

cepted fields is the ground where an educative 
process is not going on. 

The kinds of activity remaining as true educa- 
tive interests vary indefinitely with age, with 
individual native endowments, with prior experi- 
ence, with social opportunities. It is out of the 
question to try to catalogue them. But we may 
discriminate some of their more general aspects, 
and thereby, perhaps, make the connection of 
interest with educational practice somewhat more 
concretely obvious. - Since one of the main rea- 
sons for taking self-activity in a formal sense 
was ignoring the importance of the body and of 
bodily instinct, we may well begin with interest 
in activity in this most direct and literal sense. 

i. It is an old story that the human young 
have to learn most of the things that the young 
of other animals do instinctively or else with a 
slight amount of trying. Reflection on this fact 
shows that in learning these things human off- 
spring are brought to the need of learning other 
things, and also to acquiring a habit of learning 
— a love of learning. While these considerations 
are fairly familiar, we often overlook their bear- 
6 7 



\ 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

ing upon the fact of physical activities. It follows 
from them at once that in so far as a physical ac- 
tivity has to be learned, it is not merely physical, 
but is mental, intellectual, in quality. The first 
problem set the human young is learning to use 
the organs of sense — the eye, ear, touch, etc. — 
and of movement — the muscles — in connection 
with one another. Of course, some of the mastery 
achieved does not involve much mental experi- 
mentation, but is due to the ripening of physio- 
logical connections. But nevertheless there is 
a genuinely intellectual factor when the child 
learns that one kind of eye-activity means a cer- 
tain kind of moving of the arm, clasping of the 
fingers, etc., and that this in turn entails a certain 
kind of exploring with the fingers, resulting in ex- 
perience of smoothness, etc. In such cases, there 
is not simply an acquisition of a new physical ca- 
pacity ; there is also learning in the mental sense; 
something has been found out. The rapidity of 
mental development in the first year and a half of 
infancy, the whole-hearted intentness and absorp- 
tion of the growing baby in his activities, the 
joy that accompanies his increase of ability to 
68 



TYPES OF EDUCATIVE INTEREST 

control his movements — all of these things are 
object-lessons, writ large, as to the nature of in- 
terest, and the intellectual significance of actions 
that (externally judged) are physical. 

This period of growth occurs, of course, before 
children go to school ; at least before they go to 
anything called school. But the amount and the 
mode of learning in this school of action is most 
significant in revealing the importance of types 
of occupation within the school involving the 
exercise of senses and movement. One of the 
reasons (as already indicated) for the slight ad- 
vance made in putting in practice the doctrine of 
self-activity (with its recommendation of mental 
initiative and intellectual self-reliance, and its 
attacks upon the idea of pouring in and passive 
absorption) is precisely that it was supposed that 
self-activity could be secured purely internally, 
without the cooperation of bodily action through 
play, construction of objects, and manipulation 
of materials and tools. Only with children hav- 
ing specialized intellectual abilities is it possible 
to secure mental activity without participation 
of the organs of sense and the muscles. Yet how 

6 9 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

much of elementary schooling has consisted in 
the imposition of forms of discipline intended to 
' repress all activity of the body ! Under such a 
regime it is not surprising that children are 
found to be naturally averse to learning, or that 
intellectual activity is found to be so foreign 
to their nature that they have to be coerced or 
cunningly coaxed to engage in it ! So educators 
blamed the children or the perverseness of human 
nature, instead of attacking the conditions which, 
by divorcing learning from use of the natural 
organs of action, made learning both difficult and 
onerous. 

The teachings of Pestalozzi and of the sense- 
training and object-lesson schools in pedagogy 
were the first important influence in challeng- 
ing the supremacy of a purely formal, because 
inner and abstract, conception of self-activity. 
But, unfortunately, the psychology of the times 
was still associated with a false physiology and 
a false philosophy of the relations of mind and 
body. The senses were supposed to be the in- 
lets, the avenues, the gateways, of knowledge, or 
at least of the raw materials of knowledge. It 
70 



TYPES OF EDUCATIVE INTEREST 

was not known that the sense-organs are simply 
the pathways of stimuli to motor-responses, and 
that it is only through these motor-responses, 
and especially through consideration of the 
adapting of sense-stimulus and motor-response 
to each other that growth of knowledge occurs. 
The sense-qualities of color, sound, contact, etc., 
are important not in their mere reception and 
storage, but in their connection with the various 
forms of behavior that secure intelligent control. 
The baby would not arrive even at the knowl- 
edge of individual things, — hat, chair, orange, 
stone, tree, — were it not for the active responses 
through which various qualities are made mutually 
significant of one another, and thereby knit into 
coherent wholes. 'Even in the ordinary hard-and- 
fast school, where it is thought to be a main 
duty to suppress all forms of motor-activity, the 
physical activities that are still allowed under 
the circumstances, such as moving the eyes, lips, 
etc., in reading to one's self; the physical adjust- */ 
ments of reading aloud, figuring, writing, recit- 
ing, are much more important than is generally 
recognized in holding attention. The outlet in 
71 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

action is so scanty and so accidental, however, 
that much energy remains unutilized and hence 
ready to break forth in mischief or worse ; while 
mind takes flights of uncontrolled fancy, day- 
dreaming and wandering to all sorts of subjects. 
The next great advance in the development 
of a more real, less arbitrary conception of ac- 
tivity, came with Froebel and the kindergarten 
movement. Plays, games, occupations of a con- 
secutive sort, requiring both construction and 
manipulation, were recognized, practically for the 
first time since Plato, as of essential educational 
importance. The place of the exercise of bodily 
functions in the growth of mind was practically 
acknowledged. But the use of the principle was 
still hampered and distorted by a false physiol- 
ogy and psychology. The direct contribution to 
growth made by the free and full control of 
bodily organs, of physical materials and appli- 
ances in the realization of purposes, was not un- 
derstood. Hence the value of the physical side 
of play, games, occupations, the use of gifts, etc., 
was explained by recourse to indirect considera- 
tion — by symbolism. It was supposed that the 
72 



TYPES OF EDUCATIVE INTEREST 

educative development was not on account of 
what was directly done, but because of certain 
ultimate philosophical and spiritual principles 
which the activities somehow symbolically stood 
for. Save for the danger of introducing an ele- 
ment of unreality and so of sentimentality, this 
misinterpretation of the source of value in the 
kindergarten activities would not have been so 
serious had it not reacted very decisively upon 
the selection and organization of materials and 
activities. The disciples of Froebel were not 
free to take plays and modes of occupation upon 
their own merits ; they had to select and arrange 
them in accordance with certain alleged prin- 
ciples of symbolism, as related to a supposed 
law of the unfolding of an enfolded Absolute 
Whole. Certain raw materials and lines of action 
shown by experience outside the school to be of 
great value were excluded because the principles 
of symbolic interpretation did not apply to them. 
These same principles led, moreover, to an exag- 
gerated preference for geometrically abstract 
forms, and to insistence upon rigid adherence to 
a highly elaborate technique for dealing with 
73 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

them. Only within the last generation have the 
advances of science and philosophy brought about 
recognition of the direct value of actions and 
a freer utilization of play and occupational ac- 
tivities. v Conceived in this freer and more scien- 
tific way, the principles of Froebel undoubtedly 
represent the greatest advance yet made in the 
recognition of the possibilities of bodily action 
in educative growth. The methods of Montessori 
are based on a like recognition, with the advan- 
tage of additional technical knowledge ; and if the 
tendency to reduce them to isolated mechanical 
exercises (a tendency unfortunately attendant 
upon the spread of every definitely formulated 
system) can be resisted or overcome, they un- 
doubtedly suggest further resources that can be 
utilized with younger children, or with older 
children whose sensori-motor development has 
been retarded. 

2. In this discussion of physical activity I 
have had in mind for the most part that of the 
organs of the body, especially the hands, as em- 
ployed directly with simple materials, or at most 
such simple appliances as a pencil, a brush, etc. 
74 



TYPES OF EDUCATIVE INTEREST 

A higher form of activity involving the sensori- 
motor apparatus of the body is found when the 
control over external objects is achieved by means 
of tools of some sort, or by the application of one 
material to another. The use of a saw, a gimlet, a 
plane, of modeling-sticks, etc., illustrate the inter- 
vention of tools. The use of a thread in sewing, 
the application of heat and moisture in cooking 
or other simple experimentations, illustrate the 
use of one thing (or mode of energy) to bring 
about a change in another thing. There is, of 
course, no sharp distinction, either in practice or 
in principle, between this form of activity and 
the more direct kind just discussed. The organs 
of the body — especially the hands — may be re- 
garded as a kind of tools whose use is to be 
learned by trying and thinking. Tools may be 
regarded as a sort of extension of the bodily 
organs. But the growing use of the latter opens 
a new line of development so important in its 
consequences that it is worth while to give it 
distinctive recognition. It is the discovery and 
use of extra-organic tools which has made pos- 
sible y both in the history of the race and of the 
75 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

individual, complicated activities of a long dur- 
ation — that is, with results that are long post- 
poned. And, as we have already seen, it is this 
prolongation and postponement which requires 
an increasing use of intelligence. The use of 
tools and appliances (in the broad sense) also 
demands a greater degree of technical skill 
than does mastery of the use of the natural 
organs — or rather, it involves the problem of 
a progressively more complicated use of the 
latter — and hence stimulates a new line of 
development. 

Roughly speaking, the use of such intervening 
appliances marks off games and work on one side, 
from play on the other. For a time children are 
satisfied with such changes as they can bring 
about with their hands and by locomotion and 
transportation. Other changes which they cannot 
so effect they are satisfied to imagine, without 
an actual physical modification. Let us "play" 
— let us "make-believe" that things are so and 
so, suffices. One thing may be made to stand for 
another, irrespective of its actual fitness. Thus 
leaves become dishes, bright stones articles of 

7 6 



TYPES OF EDUCATIVE INTEREST 

food, splinters of wood knives and forks, when 
children are playing at setting a table. In free 
play things are plastic to alter their nature as 
mood or passing need dictates ; chairs now serve 
as wagons, now as a train of cars, now as boats, 
etc. In games, however, there are rules to be 
followed; so that things have to be used in 
definite ways, since they are means for accom- 
plishing definite ends, as a club is a bat for hit- 
ting a ball. In similar fashion, children as their 
powers mature want real dishes, real articles of 
food ; and are better satisfied if they can actually 
make a fire and cook. They want to use the 
things that are fitted to their purposes and that 
will really accomplish certain results, instead of 
effecting them only in fancy. It will be found 
that the change comes with ability to carry a 
purpose in mind for a longer time. The little 
child is impatient, as we say, for immediate re- 
turns. He cannot wait to get the appropriate 
means and use them in the appropriate way to 
achieve the end : not because he is physically more 
impatient than older persons, but because an end 
that is not achieved almost at once gets away 
77 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

from his mind. To execute his purpose he makes 
his "means" realize his ideas at one stroke of 
the magic wand of imagination. But as ideas per- 
sist for a longer time they can be employed to 
effect an actual transformation of conditions — 
a process that almost always requires the in- 
tervention of tools, or the use of intervening 
appliances. 

There seems to be no better name for the acts 
of using intermediate means, or appliances, to 
reach ends than work. When employed in this 
way, however, work must be distinguished from 
labor and from toil and drudgery. Labor means 
a form of work in which the direct result accom- 
plished is of value only as a means of exchange 
for something else. It is an economic term, being 
applied to that form of work where the product 
is paid for, and the money paid is used for objects 
of more direct values. Toil implies unusual ardu- 
ousness in a task, involving fatigue. Drudgery is 
an activity which in itself is quite disagreeable, 
performed under the constraint of some quite 
extraneous need. Play and work cannot, therefore, 
be distinguished from one another according to 
78 



TYPES OF EDUCATIVE INTEREST 

the presence or absence of direct interest in what 
is doing. A child engaged in making something 
with tools, say, a boat, may be just as immedi- 
ately interested in what he is doing as if he were 
sailing the boat. He is not doing what he does 
for the mere sake of an external result — the boat 
— nor for the mere sake of sailing it later. The 
thought of the finished product and of the use 
to which it is to be put may come to his mind, 
but so as to enhance his immediate activity of 
construction. In this case, his interest is free. * 
He has a play-motive ; his activity is essentially 
artistic in principle. What differentiates it from 
more spontaneous play is an intellectual qual- 
ity ; a remoter end in time serves to suggest and 
regulate a series of acts. Not to introduce an 
element of work in this sense when the child is 
ready for it is simply arbitrarily to arrest his de- 
velopment, and to force his activities to a level of 
sense-excitation after he is prepared to act upon 
the basis of an idea. A mode of activity that was 
quite normal in its own period becomes disinte- 
grating when persisted in after a person is ripe 
for an activity involving more thought. We must 
79 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

also remember that the change from an activity 
with an end near by to one with an end farther 
off does not come all at once, nor at the same 
time with respect to all things. A child may be 
ready for occupation with tools like scissors, 
paint and brush, for setting a table, cooking, etc., 
while with respect to other activities he is still 
unable to plan and arrange ahead. Thus there is 
no ground for the assumption that children of 
kindergarten age are capable only of make-be- 
lieve play, while children of the primary grades 
should be held to all work and no play. Only the 
false idea about symbolism leads to the former 
conclusion ; and only a false identification of in- 
terest and play with trivial amusement leads to 
the latter conclusion. It has been said that man 
is man only as he plays ; to say this involves 
some change from the meaning in which play 
has just been used. But in the broader sense of 
whole-hearted identification with what one is doing 
— in the sense of completeness of interest, it is 
so true that it should be a truism. 

Work in the sense in which it has been de- 
fined covers all activities involving the use of 
80 



TYPES OF EDUCATIVE INTEREST 

intervening materials, appliances, and forms of 
skill consciously used in achieving results. It 
covers all forms of expression and construction 
with tools and materials, all forms of artistic and 
manual activity so far as they involve the con- 
scious or thoughtful endeavor to achieve an end. 
They include, that is, painting, drawing, clay 
modeling, singing so far as there is any conscious 
attention to means — to the technique of exe- 
cution. They comprehend the various forms of 
manual training, work with wood, metal, tex- 
tiles, cooking, sewing, etc., so far as these in- 
volve an idea of the result to be accomplished 
(instead of working from dictation or an external 
model which does away with the need for thought). 
They cover also the manual side of scientific in- 
quiry, the collection of materials for study, the 
management of apparatus, the sequence of acts 
required in carrying on and in recording experi- 
ments. 

3. So far as this latter interest — the interest 

in discovery or in finding out what happens under 

given circumstances — gains in importance, there 

develops a third type of interest — the distinc- 

81 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

tively intellectual interest. Our wording should 
be carefully noted. The intellectual interest is 
not a new thing, now showing itself for the first 
time. Our discussion of the development of the 
so-called physical activities of a baby, and of 
the constructive work of children, youth, and 
adults has been intended to show that intel- 
ligence, in the form of clear perception of the 
result of an activity and search for and adapta- 
tion of means, should be an integral part of such 
activities. But it is possible for this intellectual 
interest to be subordinate, to be subsidiary, to 
the accomplishment of a process. But it is also 
possible for it to become a dominating interest, 
so that instead of thinking things out and dis- 
covering them for the sake of the successful 
achievement of an activity, we institute the ac- 
tivity for the sake of finding out something. 
Then the distinctively intellectual, or theoretical, 
interest shows itself. 

As there is no sharp line of division in theory, 

so there is none in practice. Planning ahead, 

taking notice of what happens, relating this to 

what is attempted, are parts of all intelligent or 

82 



TYPES OF EDUCATIVE INTEREST 

purposive activities. It is the business of educa- 
tors to see that the conditions of expression of the 
practical interests are such as to encourage the 
developing of these intellectual phases of an ac- 
tivity, and thereby evoke a gradual transition to 
the theoretical type. It is a commonplace that 
the fundamental principle of science is con- 
nected with the relation of cause and effect. In- 
terest in this relation begins on the practical side. 
Some effect is aimed at, is desired and worked 
for, and attention is given to the conditions for 
producing it. At first the interest in the achieve- 
ment of the end predominates; but in the degree 
in which this interest is bound up with thought- 
ful effort, interest in the end or effect is of ne- 
cessity transferred to the interest in the means 
— the causes — which bring it about. Where 
work with tools, gardening, cooking, etc., is 
intelligently carried on, it is comparatively a 
simple matter to secure a transfer of interest 
from the practical side to experimentation for 
the sake of discovery. When any one be- 
comes interested in a problem as a problem 
and in inquiry and learning for the sake of 
83 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

solving the problem, interest is distinctively 
intellectual. 

4. Social interest, interest in persons, is a 
strong special interest, and also one which inter- 
twines with those already named. Small chil- 
dren's concern with persons is remarkably intense. 
Their dependence upon others for support and 
guidance, if nothing else, provides a natural basis 
for attention to people and for a wish to enter 
\ into intimate connections with them.\ Then dis- 
tinctively social instincts, such as sympathy, imi- 
tation, love of approval, etc., come in. Children's 
contact with other persons is continuous ; and 
there are practically no activities of a child that 
are isolated. His own activities are so bound up 
with others, and what others do touches him so 
deeply and in so many ways, that it is only at 
rare moments, perhaps of a clash of wills, that a 
child draws a sharp line between other peoples' 
affairs as definitely theirs and his own as exclu- 
sively his. His father and mother, his brothers 
and sisters, his home, his friends are his ; they 
belong to his idea of himself. If they were cut 
away from his thought of himself, and from his 
84 



TYPES OF EDUCATIVE INTEREST 

hopes, desires, plans, and experiences, the latter 
would lose pretty much all their contents. Because 
of limitations of experience and of intelligence, 
there are many affairs of others that a child can- 
not make his own ; but within these limits a child's 
identification of his own concerns with those of 
others is naturally even more intense than that 
of grown persons. He has not come into busi- 
ness rivalries with them ; the number of people 
whom he meets who are not sympathetic with 
his concerns is small ; it is through entering into 
the actions of others, directly and imaginatively, 
that he finds the most significant and the most 
rewarding of all his experiences. In these re- 
gards, a child is likely to be more social in his 
interests than the average adult. 

This social interest not only, then, interfuses 
and permeates his interest in his own actions 
and sufferings, but it also suffuses his interest in 
things. Adults are so accustomed to making a 
sharp distinction between their relations to things 
and to other persons ; their pursuits in life are 
so largely specialized along the line of having to 
do with things just as things, that it is difficult 

85 



• 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

for them, practically impossible, to realize the 
extent to which children are concerned with 
things only as they enter into and affect the con- 
cerns of persons, and the extent to which a per- 
sonal-social interest radiates upon objects and 
gives them their meaning and worth. A mo- 
ment's consideration of children's plays shows 
how largely they are sympathetic and dramatic 
reproductions of social activities ; and thereby 
affords a clew to the extent in which interest in 
things is borrowed from thfeir ideas of what peo- 
ple do to and with things.' Much of the so-called 
animistic tendency of children, their tendency 
to personify natural objects and events, is at 
bottom nothing but an overflow of their social 
interests. It is not so much that they literally 
conceive things to be alive, as that things are of 
interest to them only when they are encom- 
passed with the interests they see exemplified 
in persons ; otherwise things are, at first, more 
or less matters of indifference to them. 

No doubt some of the repulsiveness of purely 
abstract intellectual studies to many children is 
simply the reflex of the fact that the things — the 
86 



TYPES OF EDUCATIVE INTEREST 

facts and truths — presented to them have been / 
isolated from their human context. This does 
not mean, of course, that a mythological or fan- 
ciful human character should be attributed to 
inanimate things ; but it does mean that imper- 
sonal material should be presented so far as pos- 
sible in the role it actually plays in life. Children 
generally begin the study of geography, for ex- 
ample, with a social interest so strong that it is 
fairly romantic. Their imaginations are fired by 
the thought of learning how strange and far-away 
peoples live and fare. Then they are fed on ab- 
stract definitions and classifications ; or, what is 
almost as deadening, upon bare physical facts 
about the forms of land and water, the structure 
of continents, etc. Then there are complaints 
that children have so little interest in the study 
— simply because they have not been touched 
where they are at home. In such sciences as 
physics and chemistry there are enough facts 
and principles which are associated with human 
concerns to supply adequate material for thorough 
grounding in the methods of those sciences. 
It is not necessary to do more than to allude 
87 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

to the close connection between social and moral 
interests. 1 In those cases where direct interest 
points one way and obligation another, no rein- 
forcement of the demand of duty is as strong as 
that furnished by a realization of the interests of 
others that are bound up with it. The abstract 
idea of duty, like other abstract ideas, has nat- 
urally little motivating force. Social interests 
have a powerful hold, which, by association, is 
transferred to what is morally required. Thus a 
strong indirect interest resists the contrary pull 
of immediate inclination. The only other moral 
point that need be mentioned here is that the 
conception of interest as naturally a selfish or 
egoistic principle is wholly irreconcilable with 
the facts of the case. All interest is naturally in 
objects that carry an activity forward or in ob- 
jects that mark its fulfillment ; hence the char- 
acter of the interest depends upon the nature of 
these objects. ' If they are low, or unworthy, or 
purely selfish, then so is the interest, but not 
otherwise. The strength of the interest in other 
persons and in their activities and aims is a 

1 See Moral Principles in Education, in this Series. 

88 



TYPES OF EDUCATIVE INTEREST 

natural resource for making activities broad, 
generous, and enlightened in scope; while the 
physical, manual, and scientific interests in their 
identification with objects make for a broaden- 
ing of the self. 



THE PLACE OF INTEREST IN THE THEORY 
OF EDUCATION 

We conclude with a brief restatement setting 
forth the importance of the idea of interest for 
educational theory. Interests, as we have noted, 
are very varied ; every impulse and habit that 
generates a purpose having sufficient force to 
move a person to strive for its realization, be- 
comes an interest. But in spite of this diversity, 
interests are one in principle. They all mark an 
identification in action, and hence in desire, effort, 
and thought, of self with objects ; with, namely, 
the objects in which the activity terminates 
(ends) and with the objects by which it is carried 
forward to its end (means). Interest, in the emo- 
tional sense of the word, is the evidence of the 
way in which the self is engaged, occupied, taken 
up with, concerned in, absorbed by, carried away 
by, this objective subject-matter. I At bottom all 
misconceptions of interest, whether in practice 
90 



PLACE OF INTEREST IN THEORY 

or in theory, come from ignoring or excluding its 
moving, developing nature ; they bring an activity 
to a standstill, cut up its progressive growth into 
a series of static cross-sections. When this hap- 
pens, nothing remains but to identify interest 
with the momentary excitation an object arouses. 
Such a relation of object and self is not only 
not educative, but it is worse than nothing. It 
dissipates energy, and forms a habit of depend- 
ence upon such meaningless excitations, a habit 
most adverse to sustained thought and endeavor. 
Wherever such practices are resorted to in the 
name of interest, they very properly bring it into 
disrepute. It is not enough to catch attention ; 
it must be held. It does not suffice to arouse 
energy ; the course that energy takes, the results 
that it effects are the important matters. 

But since activities, even those originally im- 
pulsive, are more or less continuous or enduring, 
such static, non-developing excitements, repre- 
sent not interest, but an abnormal set of condi- 
tions. The positive contributions' of the idea of 
interest to pedagogic theory are twofold. In 
the first place, it protects us from a merely 
91 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

internal conception of mind ; and, in the sec- 
ond place, from a merely external conception of 
subject-matter. 

(i) Any one who has grasped the conception 
of an interest as an activity that moves toward 
an end, developing as it proceeds thought of this 
end and search for means, will never fall into 
the error of thinking of mind (or of the self) as 
an isolated inner world by itself. It will be ap- 
parent that mind is one with intelligent or pur- 
poseful activity — with an activity that means 
something and in which the meaning counts as 
a factor in the development of an activity. There 
is a sense in which mind is measured by growth 
of power of abstraction, and a very important 
sense this is. There is another sense in which it 
can be truly said that abstractness is the worst 
evil that infests education. The false sense of 
abstraction is connected with thinking of mental 
activity as something that can go on wholly by 
itself, apart from objects or from the world of 
persons and things. Real subject-matter being 
removed, something else has to be supplied in 
its place for the mind to occupy itself with. This 
92 



PLAGE OF INTEREST IN THEORY 

something else must of necessity be mere sym- 
bols ; that is to say things that are not signs of 
anything, because the first-hand subject-matter 
which gives them meaning has been excluded 
or at least neglected. Or when objects — con- 
crete facts, etc. — are introduced, it is as mere 
occasions for the mind to exercise its own sepa- 
rate powers — just as dumb-bells or pulleys and 
weights are a mere occasion for exercising the 
muscles. The world of studies then becomes a 
strange and peculiar world, because a world cut 
off from — abstracted from — the world in which 
pupils as human beings live and act and suffer. 
Lack of "interest," lack of power to hold atten- 
tion and stir thought, are a necessary conse- 
quence of the unreality attendant upon such a 
realm for study. Then it is concluded that the 
"minds " of children or of people in general are 
averse to learning, are indifferent to the con- 
cerns of intelligence. But such indifference and 
aversion are always evidence — either directly 
or as a consequence of previous bad conditions 
— that the appropriate conditions for the exer- 
cise of mind are not there : — that they are ex- 
93 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

eluded because there has been no provision of 
situations in which things have to be intelligently 
dealt with. Everything that is disparaging in the 
common use of the terms academic, abstract, 
formal, theoretical, has its roots here. 1 

(2) The supposed externality of subject-matter 
is but the counterpart phase of the alleged in- 
ternal isolation of mind. If mind means certain 
powers or faculties existing in themselves and 
needing only to be exercised by and upon presented 
subject-matter, the presented subject-matter must 
mean something complete in its ready-made and 
fixed separateness. Objects, facts, truths of geog- 
raphy, history, and science not being conceived 
as means and ends for the intelligent develop- 
ment of experience, are thought of just as stuff 
to be learned. Reading, writing, figuring are 
mere external forms of skill to be mastered. 
Even the arts — drawing, singing — are thought 
of as meaning so many ready-made things, pic- 
tures, songs, that are to be externally produced 

1 Of course, nothing that is said here is meant to depre- 
ciate the wonderful possibilities involved in an imaginative 
experimentation with things, after the conditions of more direct 
transactions with them have been met. 

94 



J 



PLACE OF INTEREST IN THEORY 

and reproduced. Then we have the situation 
described in the early portion of this essay : 
Some means must be found to overcome the 
separation of mind and subject-matter; problems 
of method in teaching are reduced to various 
ways of overcoming a gap which exists only be- 
cause a radically wrong method had already been 
entered upon. The doctrine of interest is not a 
short cut to "methods" of this sort. On the 
contrary, it is a warning to furnish conditions 
such that the natural impulses and acquired 
habits, as far as they are desirable, shall obtain 
subject-matter and modes of skill in order to de- 
velop to their natural ends of achievement and 
efficiency. Interest, the identification of mind 
with the material and methods of a developing 
activity, is the inevitable result of the presence 
of such situations. 

Hence it follows that little can be accom- 
plished by setting up "interest" as an end or a 
method by itself. Interest is obtained not by 
thinking about it and consciously aiming at it, but 
by considering and aiming at the conditions that 
lie back of it, and compel it. If we can discover 
95 



INTEREST AND EFFORT 

a child's urgent needs and powers, and if we can 
supply an environment of materials, appliances, 
and resources — physical, social, and intellectual 
— to direct their adequate operation, we shall 
not have to think about interest. It will take 
care of itself. \ For mind will have met with what 
it needs in order to be mind. The problem of 
educators, teachers, parents, the state, is to pro- 
vide the environment that induces educative or 
developing activities, and where these are found 
the one thing needful in education is secured. 



OUTLINE 

I. UNIFIED VERSUS DIVIDED ACTIVITY. 

1. The educational lawsuit of interest versus effort I 

2. The case against the current theory of effort . 2 

3. The case against the current theory of interest . 3 

4. Each is strong in its attacks upon the opposite 

theory 6 

5. Both fail to recognize the identity of facts and 

actions with the self 7 

6. Both are intellectually and morally harmful .- . 7 

7. The child's demand for realization of his own 

impulses cannot be suppressed 8 

8. Emphasizing outward habits of action leaves 

the child's inner nature to its caprices ... 10 

9. Making things interesting substitutes the pleas- 

ure of excitation for that of activity .... 12 

10. The result is division of energies 13 

(a) In disagreeable effort it is simultaneous . 
(J?) In adventitious interest it is successive . 

11. When properly conceived, interest and effort 

are vitally related 14 

II. INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT 

1. A brief descriptive account of interest ... 16 

2. The active or propulsive phase 17 

3. The objective phase 19 

97 



OUTLINE 

4. The emotional phase 20 

5. Interest is primarily a form of self-expressive 

activity 21 

6. Direct or immediated interest 21 

7. Indirect, transferred or mediated interest . . 22 

8. Two thoroughgoing errors 23 

(a) Selecting subject-matter regardless of in- 
terest 

{b) Making method a device for dressing up 
unrelated materials 

9. The criterion for judging cases of transferred 

interest 25 

(a) Are means and ends intrinsically con- 
nected ? 

(6) Two illustrative cases 

10. Means and end are stages of a single develop- 

ing activity 28 

{a) Three illustrations 

11. Failure follows the appeal to adventitious or 

substituted interests 33 

12. The true relation of subject-matter and the 

child's activities 34 

13. Consequences of this view for pleasure and 

happiness 35 

14. There is no rigid line between direct and in- 

direct interests 36 

15. Indirect interests are symptomatic of the ex- 

pansion of simple activities into more com- 
plex ones 38 

16. Indirect values become direct 39 

17. Interest is legitimate only when it fosters de- 

velopment 41 

98 




OUTLINE 

i 8. Genuine interest indicates personal identifica- 
tion with a course of action ...... 43 

III. EFFORT, THINKING, AND MOTIVATION 

1. The demand for effort is a demand for con- 

tinuity in the face of difficulties v 46 

2. It has no significance apart from an end to be 

reached 47 

3. Persistent but obstructed activity creates con- 

flicting tendencies ; dislike and longing . . 49 

4. The emotion of effort or stress is a warning to 

reflect 50 

{a) On the worth of the end 

(b) On the provision of new means .... 

5. The experience of difficulty may have a double 

effect 

(a) To weaken the impetus in a forward direc- 

tion 51 

(b) To increase consciousness of the end . . 52 

6. A conscious aim inspirits and guides in two ways 

(a) It makes the individual more conscious 

of his purpose 53 

(b) It turns his energy from thoughtless 
struggle to reflective judgment .... 53 

7. The difference between educative and uneduca- 

tive tasks 55 

8. The criteria to be borne in mind : 56 

{a) Is it so easy that it fails to stimulate 

thought? 

(b) Is it so difficult that it discourages activity ? 

9. Some specific consequences of violating these 

criteria 57 

99 



OUTLINE 

io. Good teaching must stimulate initiative ... 58 

11. Difficulties and effort occur normally with in- 

creased depth and scope of thinking ... 59 

12. Motive is a name for end in its active or dynamic 

capacity . . 60 

13. Personal motivation cannot be thought of apart 

from an object or end in view 61 

14. The problem is not to find a motive, but materials 

and conditions for the exercise of activities . 62 

15. The use and function of subject-matter is to pro- 

mote the growth of personal powers .... 63 

IV. TYPES OF EDUCATIVE INTEREST 

1. Genuine interest is always marked by the absorp- 

tion of powers in an occupation or pursuit . 65 

2. Activity includes all the expressions that involve 

growth of power 66 

(a) It specially includes : Power to realize the 
meaning of what is done 

(b) It excludes action under external con- 
straint, random reaction, and habitual 
action 

3. True educative interests or activities vary in- 

f definitely 67 

4. Physical activity 67 

(a) In so far as physical activity has to be 

learned it is intellectual in value ... 68 

(b) The importance of school occupations 

which involves the exercise of senses and 
movements 69 

(c) Sense organs are simply the pathways of 

stimuli to motor responses 70 

100 



OUTLINE 

(d) Growth of knowledge occurs in adapting 

sense-stimulus and motor response ... 71 

(e) The great value of a wide range of play 

games, and occupations ...... 72 

5. Constructive activity 74 

(a) The use of tools and appliances makes 

possible development through compli- 
cated activities of long duration ... 75 

(b) The use of intervening tools distinguishes 

games and work from play 76 

(c) Work is distinguished from play only by 

the presence of an intellectual quality. . 79 

(d) Children need both work and play ... 80 

6. Intellectual activity 81 

(a) The intellectual phases previously subor- 

dinate, develop and become dominant . . 82 

(b) Interest in the theoretical becomes direct . 83 

7. Social activity 

{a) The child early identifies his concerns 

with those of others 84 

(b) His social interest also suffuses his interest 

in things 86 

(c) Impersonal material should be presented 

in the role it actually plays in life ... 87 

(d) There is a close connection between social 

and moral interests 88 

(e) Interest itself is not selfish ; its character 

depends upon its objects 88 



IOI 



OUTLINE 

V. THE PLACE OF INTEREST IN THE THEORY 
OF EDUCATION 

1. All interests mark an identification of self with 

ends and means 90 

2. All misconceptions of interest come from ignor- 

ing its moving, developing nature .... 91 

3. The idea of interest protects pedagogical theory 

(a) From a merely internal conception of mind 92 
{b) From a merely external conception of sub- 
ject-matter 94 

4. Interest is obtained by considering and aiming 

at the conditions that lie back of it ... . 95 



THE RIVERSIDE EDUCATIONAL 
MONOGRAPHS 

GENERAL EDUCATIONAL THEORY 

Dewey's INTEREST AND EFFORT IN EDUCATION 60 

Dewey's MORAL PRINCIPLES IN EDUCATION .35 

Eliot's EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY .35 

Emerson's EDUCATION [ 35 

Fiskb's THE MEANING OF INFANCY .35 

Hyde's THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY [35 

Palmer's THE IDEAL TEACHER .'35 

Terman's THE TEACHER'S HEALTH '. .60 

Thorndikb's INDIVIDUALITY ,35 

ADMINISTRATION AND SUPERVISION OF SCHOOLS 

Betts'sNEW IDEALS IN RURAL SCHOOLS 60 

Bloomfield's VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE OF YOUTH... .60 
Cubberlby's CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCA- 



TION 



.35 



Cubberlby's THE IMPROVEMENT OF RURAL SCHOOLS .35 

Perry's STATUS OF THE TEACHER 35 

Snbdden's THE PROBLEM OF VOCATIONAL EDUCA- 
TI ON <35 

Trowbridge's THE HOME SCHOOL 60 

Weeks'sTHE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL ^0 

METHODS OF TEACHING 

Betts's THE RECITATION #60 

Campagnac's THE TEACHING OF COMPOSITION .35 

Cooley's LANGUAGE TEACHING IN THE GRADES-... .35 

Earhart's TEACHING CHILDREN TO STUDY 60 

Evans's TEACHING OF HIGH SCHOOL MATHE- 
MATICS 35 

Haliburton and Smith's TEACHING POETRY IN THE 
GRADES 60 

Hartwell's TEACHING OF HISTORY 35 

Palmer's ETHICAL AND MORAL INSTRUCTION IN 

THE SCHOOLS >35 

Palmer's SELF-CULTIVATION IN ENGLISH .35 

Suzzallo's TEACHING OF PRIMARY ARITHMETIC-... .60 
Suzzallo's TEACHING OF SPELLING 60 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

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